Etchings in Stone
by kenzimone
Summary: The Dreams tell her of What Will Come, and their revelations are as unmovable as mountains, their promises finalized as etchings in stone. [AU companion piece to 'Scribbles on Napkins' and 'Scratches on Skin']


**Title**: Etchings in Stone  
**Author**: kenzimone  
**Disclaimer**: Don't own.  
**Rating**: R  
**Summary**: The Dreams tell her of What Will Come, and their revelations are as unmovable as mountains, their promises finalized as etchings in stone. (AU)  
**Note**: Final fic in the _Scribbles on Napkins_ story arc, and a sequel to_ Scratches on Skin_. For the LJ community fanfic100's 35th prompt: 'Sixth Sense'. Huge thanks to PyroBlaze18 for the beta.

* * *

Susan Peace has her first Dream five days after her seventh birthday. In her sleep she sees a swallow fly head first into a window, breaking its neck and creating a web of intricate cracks spreading out through the thin glass; the sound of the bird's neck snapping is louder than she knows it'll be in real life, and it reverberates throughout her skull as the chime of a bell, growing louder and louder until she thinks her head will explode from the mere vibrations of the tone. That's when she wakes up, grasping at her blanket and discovering that her stuffed bear has slipped off the side of her bed and fallen down onto the floor.

She would forget all about it, push it aside as you normally do scary dreams that when you finally take the time to look back upon them and study them turn out to be not as frightening as you first thought, only the Dream won't let her.

As early as that very evening, while her mother passes the meat around the dining room table and her father tells her to stop pouring pepper into her milk, one of the swallows from the nest beneath the neighbors' roof sweeps down and hits one of the glass panels in the large windows facing the street. It is over in a flash of a second, but the webbed cracks remain long after the bird has fallen to the ground, and the blood seeping through them paints a disturbing picture against the evening sun.

Still, her mother can't understand why she won't stop crying until long after the bird has been buried in the front yard and the red dripping down the glass has been carefully wiped away.

...

What follows is a complex schedule of previews of events yet to occur, flashes bathed in red and yellow and sometimes silver, teasing her with information that she at first can't decipher but by time grows more and more able to piece together accounts and happenings from. She will never call these flashes Visions, because they aren't Waking Dreams, just as she will never tell anyone how she, at eight years old, knew to pack that roll of gauze for her class field trip where Billy fell and cut his leg.

It never really occurs to her to try and interfere with the story the Dreams tell, mostly because she is so young but also because a small part of her hopes that maybe some day they will stop coming true; not until after her twelfth birthday, when she sees the kitten she's gotten as a present from her grandmother get hit by a car in a Dream.

She spends the entire day sitting on the front lawn, holding her kitten safely in her lap, until she sees that very same car as in her Dream – red, old and rusty, with a cracked windshield and a broken taillight – drive past. Not until then does she dare to let her pet escape the confines of her arms and resume its interrupted play in the grass.

She doesn't dream that night, or the nights that follow, but awakes two weeks later to find her kitten on her bedroom floor, wheezing and coughing and being unable to breathe. Unlike the quick and relatively painless death getting hit by a car would have entailed, her kitten now spends an hour struggling to fill its lungs with whatever oxygen it can inhale, never twitching or reacting as she sobs and peers down its throat hoping for something to dislodge.

When it dies, her father buries it in the garden atop the remains of the swallow, and Susan realizes that her Dreams are not meant to be prophesies she should declare to the world, but warnings of what is to come and an aid to help her prepare for them. Most importantly, she learns that she must never Interfere with her Dreams, because fate has a way of finding its way around human actions.

...

She meets her husband in high school – really, two months before that, in sparse glimpses of eyes and a smile as she sleeps – when all her books are already covered in doodles of his name and she has turned four boys who asked her to homecoming down because she knows he will come. He walks with purpose, and she will forever remember smoky leather and a wide toothed grin as he leans against her table and murmurs, "Susan Valier, right?"

"And you're Michael Peace," she says, not a question but a fact, seeing their son reflected somewhere in the depths of his eyes.

...

They marry straight out of high school, and she gets pregnant almost right away; things didn't change while she is carrying Warren, the Dreams still come; an accident on Interstate 90, with traffic jams as long as two miles, and she wakes up from her nap in the front seat and places a hand on her belly and tells Michael to exit the highway and take a more scenic route to his parents' house; three AM and she rouses her husband and tells him that it's time, even though her water doesn't break until two hours later, when they are safely in the hospital's waiting room.

With time she gets better at deciding what is to be deemed as Interfering and what can count as simply applying her knowledge to her own advantage.

...

One thing she doesn't see coming – except she does – is Michael walking out the door that May morning, dressed in his best suit and with a wicked look in his eyes. She has just finished sending Warren off to school and is lying down on the kitchen couch to rest her eyes for a bit when she sees it; fire and brimstone and her husband, backlit by a non-sun which made him seem like the reincarnate of Beelzebub himself.

It's the hardest thing she's ever had to do, watching him walk out with nothing more than a quick kiss on the lips and a low 'Goodbye, I'll be back soon' whispered in her ear, but she lets him. And when he's gone, she goes upstairs to their bedroom and begins sorting through their clothes, because the house has already outgrown the three – two – of them, and she has to start packing some time.

...

For whatever reason, there are no more Dreams after that. She sleeps soundly, in a bland and colorless world, and for the first two months the small black and white television in the kitchen is on, muted, day and night as the reporters crowding outside the courthouse and the firemen searching through the debris of skyscrapers tell her what her Dreams will not.

...

Years later, and the second thing Susan doesn't see coming – but yet again, does – is her baby boy standing tall in the hallway of their small apartment, black suit summoning echoes of his father as he tells her he'll be back before dawn. She sleeps, and wakes up before midnight, expected dreams of her own homecoming not in her mind, but Dreams; she sees fire and choking and children crying, and a great city falling through the air.

She wakes again at dawn, to see as promised her son, dried blood on his face and caked in his hair, looking down at her from her bedside. And behind him, stands her husband.

...

They eat breakfast in a kitchen with the curtains drawn, and she does not turn on the radio as is her habit, because they will talk of nothing but her husband and her son and while she wants to tell herself that it's all lies, she knows better.

Warren places a kiss on her cheek and slips back to his room, and Michael kisses her palm as she pulls the curtain away from the window with her free hand and see the flames shoot up from downtown; the city's bathed in red and orange, and she lets the cloth fall back to cover the room in darkness as her husband runs his fingers down her back and she imagines her son's school – the great city – plummeting down towards the earth.

...

Michael does not leave the apartment for three days, though Warren comes and goes, the scratches on his face starting to heal into scars that will be forever with him, a price he is willing to pay for his father's future secured.

She tries not to touch her son anymore, not like she used to, because he flinches and draws away; she watches as he lets his hair fall across his face and hide the welts, which she will never ask him about, and she doesn't see him smile until one day when he shows up with a small hamster cage, bare but for the straw on its floor and the shivering mass of black and purple huddled in one corner.

It's a small animal, which he doesn't feed – she has to sneak into his room and give it carrots whenever he's away – and which when she asks, he says has no name. It doesn't react to her presence, nor move from its corner, shivering and staring into space as if in a catatonic state of mind. But it makes her son happy, and she makes sure to stroke its peculiar purple streaked fur when leaving it carrots.

In her own mind, she names it Josie, after an old friend who is quite as gone – or lost – as the poor creature in her son's room.

...

When the doorbell rings and she opens the door, there is a girl with a baby outside; such a young thing, the girl, that she is almost tempted to ask if she's there to see her son, had she not before seen the long brown hair and cold eyes in a Dream, hidden behind a mask with a distorted voice like that of a serpent.

The baby in the girl's arms wiggles, tiny hand reaching out to push blue and red colored cloth down from its face, and then starts to cry as Michael introduces the girl as Sue Tenny and leads her into the living room. Watching from the doorway as her husband runs a hand down the baby's face and asks the girl – Sue – if it's the one, she can't help but shiver.

Michael carefully picks the baby out of Sue's arms, as the wailing intensifies, and Susan finally has to turn away because there is something in her husband's eyes that she has never seen before – not even in her Dreams – and that she never wants to see again. So she turns, and closes her eyes, and when the wailing stops by the pop of what sounds like a firecracker, she consoles herself that at least she didn't have to _see_ her husband snap that baby's neck like it was a stray cat's.

...

She finds no rest now, because the Dreams won't leave her be; fire and smoke, and her son and husband side by side in what, she recognizes, used to be the grand plaza in the very center of Maxville. She sees more children – infants – all crying, and a girl in a cage not large enough to hold her; there is no explanation as to how she got in there to begin with, and Susan simply has to watch as the bars bite into her skin and her beautiful gown – tattered and destroyed already – is ripped apart as easily as her skin.

Death and destruction, but her son and husband always side by side, always triumphant – and, she knows, she with them. The sky perpetually painted red, she closes the curtains and swallows a handful of sleeping pills; the Dreams tell her of What Will Come, and their revelations are as unmovable as mountains, their promises finalized as etchings in stone.

And so she closes the curtains, and slips into bed, into her husband's waiting arms, and tries to forget the look in his eyes as he raised his hand and let fire rain down onto the children.


End file.
